On the release of his new novel, Our Kind of Traitor, the spy master on
Russian gangsters, shady politicians and the 'very bad things' in his past.

For David Cornwell it was a simple, clear-cut, matter of morals. No deliberation needed. And so he politely declined a rendezvous with Kim Philby, possibly the world’s best-known double agent, and likely the man who ended Cornwell’s own career as a British agent for both MI5 and MI6.

‘I couldn’t possibly have shook his hand,’ he shudders. ‘It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive. Lord knows how many agents Philby betrayed. They were tortured in terrible ways.’ One appreciates his point.

And Cornwell, better known, of course, as spy and thriller novelist par excellence John le Carré, is a man with a well-honed moral mantra. For him it was the right and proper thing to do. But for le Carré, his alter ego, surely the master espionage author was tempted by the literary riches on offer? The opportunity to trawl the mind of the traitor who defected to the Soviet Union in the Sixties when he was outed as the treacherous ring leader of the infamous Cambridge Five spy circle that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross?

‘Nope,’ he says, shaking his head vigorously. ‘Because of the country he betrayed. The people he betrayed. I could not have done it. Astonishingly, I think he hoped I might write his biography. It’s the ludicrous sort of fantasy he would have entertained. A while later Phil Knightley, who did write it, phoned me and said Philby wanted to know why I wouldn’t meet him.

‘Did I know something about him that I disliked? I told him: “What, apart from the incidental little matters of those he sent to their deaths.” I know it has never been proven that he betrayed the Albanian Operation when a whole bunch of British agents trained by SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] were dropped into Albania in the crazy days of King Zog. But he was in charge of the operation. And they went to terrible deaths. And don’t forget Philby could easily have become head of the SIS.’

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The opportunity for an encounter with Philby came in the late Eighties, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual collapse of communism. Cornwell had been denied entry to the Soviet Union for years. Hardly surprising since his spy novels were required reading for the KGB. But when Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the Soviet leader Mikhail, intervened he was granted a visa – much to the KGB’s fury – and allowed to visit Moscow.

‘It was ridiculous,’ he says, rolling his eyes. ‘Every time I left my hotel room it was turned over. I was followed everywhere.’ One night, at a party, he was approached by a shady figure, one of Philby’s minders. ‘He told me he wanted me to meet a great admirer of mine, Mr Philby. It was a horrific suggestion. I told him I was meeting the British ambassador next. I couldn’t see the Queen’s ambassador and then see the Queen’s traitor.’

It was an honourable, moral decision. Which is somewhat surprising since Cornwell’s novels are peppered with moral ambiguity. Not for him the flashy Fleming world of James Bond with its shaken-not-stirred sophisticates who always happen to have the latest gadgetry tucked in the inside pocket of their immaculate tuxedos.

Cornwell’s spies are the everyday folk in impossible positions. Those whom one would least suspect. Spies, according to Alec Leamas, a central character in his first international bestseller, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, are: ‘…a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, sadists and drunkards.’

Since Cornwell was a rather successful spy himself, is the description apt?

He shifts, a little uncomfortably, in his seat. ‘It is my writing dilemma,’ he concedes. ‘The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story. As someone once said, the definition of genius – not that I’m a genius – is to have two conflicting opinions about any one subject and that's what I do all the time. Some call it ambiguity. I call it lack of resolution.’

Cornwell, now 79, allows himself a modest smile. He is, actually, an extremely modest man. With his latest book, his 22nd, Our Kind of Traitor, about to be published, his place in posterity is assured. Set amid the backdrop of the credit crunch, it is a masterly yarn of a young London couple who, on holiday in Antigua, meet a rich, charismatic Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula, wears a diamond encrusted watch, has a tattoo on the knuckle of his right hand and wants a game of tennis. And he wants a lot more besides.

The novel is a tale of greed and corruption pacing back and forth from the Arctic hells of the Gulag archipelago to a Swiss alpine house nestling in the shadow of the north face of the Eiger.

‘Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby,’ Cornwell says, sinking into an easy chair in his sun room. Beyond, through the wall of windows, the slate grey sea slaps at the shore – Cornwell’s Penzance home, bought 40 years ago for £9,000 as a wreck, now complete with a window fashioned from the nose of a Messerschmitt and an elegant staircase reclaimed from a French monastery, came with a mile of windswept cliff top, which he recently gave to the National Trust.

Alec Guiness once became spooked during a stay here, believing the house to be bugged. But it is a charming collection of interconnecting rooms: both tranquil and tasteful, full of wood panelling and flagstones. In the kitchen next door – think Aga and Le Creuset, bowls overflowing with ripened fruit and vases of honeysuckle and peonies – his wife of 38 years, Jane, is poaching salmon for lunch.

‘There’s a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.’

Cornwell writes by hand and Jane types it up. In his study, with one small, monastic window overlooking the sea, his wife’s desk is piled high with proofs that Cornwell has revised, their pages splattered with his spidery handwritten corrections. He prides himself on doing much of his own research, though he admits he is slowing down now.

‘I travelled to Rwanda and Congo researching The Mission Song and there were a few hairy moments. And I realised for the first time that the people who were travelling with me were probably worried there was going to be some trouble and they had a white-haired seventysomething in tow. I felt rather sorry for them.’

It was during a trip to Moscow almost 20 years ago that he came across the real Dima. He had told an old KGB contact that he wanted to meet one of the big time crooks and along with the hilariously named bodyguard Pussia (think Michelin Man, Cornwell says. ‘It was nice to have him there. Especially since he was a wrestling champion.’) he was told to turn up at the nightclub Dima owned in Moscow.

His instructions were to arrive at 2am and bring no weapons. ‘There were a flank of moody men with grenades strapped to their waists as we went in. It was a bit like a theatre with tables and a tiny dance floor.

‘After a long wait, Dima, flanked by a bevy of heavies and a posse of pretty, pouty, scantily clad young women, deigned to arrive. He was a big monster of a man who looked like Telly Savalas. Just as I describe him in the book.’

Eventually Cornwell was told he could approach. ‘I walked over and the only way I could get near him was to kneel on the dance floor at his feet. It was like staring into the eyes of a tiger. There was nothing there behind the eyes. His people were very unsmiling and the girls were already bored with me. And I didn’t know what the hell to ask him. So I said: “They tell me you are a crook, a gangster.” He nodded. I said: “It must be very easy to be a gangster in this kind of economy, how much are you worth?” He just shrugged.

‘I said: “Ten million dollars?” He didn’t speak. “Fifty million?” Nothing. Then I told him that when the robber barons came into the United States in the Twenties they had people killed. They robbed. But then, when their children and grandchildren were born, they got out because the ripped-off society they had created was affecting their own. And I asked him if he was going to do something like that.

‘He bent down to my interpreter and spoke quickly in Russian. I was nodding like a fool, not knowing if he was angry or not. The interpreter looked at me in embarrassment and said: ‘‘Mr David, I regret to tell you that Mr Dima says: ‘F off’.’’’

On another occasion in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), at yet another meeting with a crook in another dodgy nightclub, Cornwell couldn’t understand why the place was full of waiters and hookers, but there were no guests. ‘I had a bad feeling. Like the place was going to be blown up and everyone knew except us. I told the interpreter to ask the kitchen staff what was going on. He came back and said everything was OK but we should leave. Soon.

‘Turned out the owners had hired Chechens as bodyguards to protect the place and Russians were boycotting it. Lord knows what they had planned. We left. Immediately.’

On the corner of his leather-topped desk, weighed down by a stone from the shore – his rambling Penzance home is practically at Land’s End – sits a pile of pen-scribbled notes. ‘Dialogue, for the book I’m currently writing,’ Cornwell tells me, picking up a page. ‘Shocking little bugger out of Reading University,’ he reads. ‘That’s the bailiff speaking,’ he explains. It is unsurprising a bailiff appears. Several bailiffs were central characters in Cornwell’s early life. And the memory of them is searing.

Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, Dorset, in 1931, his mother Olive mysteriously disappeared from his life when he was just five and he and his older brother, Tony, were brought up by their father, Ronnie. Cornwell pater was nothing short of a rogue.

‘He was a con man, a fraudster,’ Cornwell says flatly. ‘He served four years for fraud, several of them in Wormwood Scrubs, and was forever oscillating between wealth and impoverishment. I don’t know how many times the bailiffs called. You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

‘And then there were the biblical spoutings from people. Like a rotten tree can’t bear forth good fruit. I was at public school and I hated it. My father never paid the fees. I wasn’t a proper gentleman. I just didn’t fit.’

His home life was bizarre to say the least. ‘During the good times, father would whisk us off to St Moritz. I learnt to read the runes as I got older. When father was flush the chauffeur-driven Bentley would be parked outside. When things were a bit iffy it was parked in the back garden, and when we were down and out it disappeared altogether. But my father was never the sort to own up to things. He would never admit he was in deep trouble. His view was if he didn’t say it aloud it wasn’t happening.’

Cornwell’s father appears in various guises in his books: even Dima displays many of his traits. ‘Manipulative, powerful, charismatic, clever, untrustworthy,’ Cornwell says in a rather flat tone when I ask him to describe his late father. ‘But the dark side was terrible. And then there was the violence.’ Cornwell won’t enlarge (one of his stepmothers is still alive) but acknowledges its existence.

‘When his fraud went wrong he would come home at night, turn off all the lights, seize a big walking stick and walk around the garden. When my sister, Charlotte [the actress], was researching her role in the film about the Krays she visited their mother. Mrs Kray showed her the family album and there was a photograph of our father with his arms around the Kray twins. You get my drift?’

As a teenager, Cornwell and his brother regularly had to undertake their father’s dirty work. ‘Such as the time when – I was about 17 – he asked us to nip around to see a titled couple, retired civil servants whose pension he had defrauded. “Tell them the cheque is in the post. That all is fine, there’s a good chap,’’ Ronnie would say.’

His mother’s disappearance from his life was, Cornwell says, quite extraordinary. When he was five, he awoke one morning to find she had vanished. He isn’t sure, exactly, that he has childhood memories of her. ‘I try to reconstruct them, but I don’t know if they are real.’

When he asked his father, Ronnie would touch his fingers to his lips and make a shushing sound. Then he would lay a guilt trip upon his sons. ‘Isn’t your father enough for you?’ he would admonish them.

The Cornwell boys learnt not to ask. Their mother, they assumed, was dead. What they didn’t know was that, unable to live with her husband’s chicanery, Olive had run away in the middle of the night. ‘Presumably she came in and kissed us. I simply don’t know,’ he says matter-of-factly.

When he turned 21, Cornwell contacted his mother’s brother and asked if she was still alive. When he got her address, he contacted her and she wrote to him telling him to catch a particular train to Ipswich, where she now lived.

She would, she wrote, meet him at the barrier. One can only wonder how he reacted when her letter arrived? Cornwell thinks for a moment then, carefully, he says: ‘When you are brought up as a frozen child you go on freezing. It wasn’t until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.’

It was an awkward reunion. ‘What does one do? Kiss? Shake hands? We hugged. I did feel a bit aggressive about it all. She said such were my father’s powerful contacts that she simply couldn’t have taken us with her. She had had a lover, a Mr Hill. My father had flings, too. It turned out she was still with her Mr Hill but throughout the years had had several liaisons with my father. In hotels, that sort of thing.’ Cornwell shakes his head.

‘I know. Extraordinary,’ he shrugs. Coincidentally, his older brother had done the same thing – tracked down his mother – when he was 21. Neither told the other for 50 years.

His father, though the relationship was uneasy, was determined his sons would be toffs: Cornwell a barrister, his brother a solicitor. ‘He would never have walked out on us,’ he concedes. ‘His big dream was that we would be gents. He enrolled me at Gray’s Inn. When he was finally declared bankrupt I found myself in Carey Street, the home of bankruptcy, explaining why I was a director of all these companies that I knew nothing about.’ When Cornwell became successful his father wrote him begging letters, which were promptly thrown in the bin. ‘Sometimes I wish I could throw away the memory of them too,’ he wrote in 2002.

Ronnie Cornwell died in 1975. Cornwell paid for the funeral but didn’t go. And now? How does he feel about him? ‘Embarrassed. Ashamed.’ It is time to change the subject.

During his teenage years Ronnie’s subterfuge meant that Cornwell was forever searching his father’s pockets, delving in his drawers, trying to piece together what was going on. It was ground work, he acknowledges, for his own fascination with the world of espionage. He was recruited into the SIS early, at just 17, in the University of Bern. ‘Oh you just get approached at a party or in the English church,’ he says diffidently. ‘It’s a very gentle process. It’s like an accident of life. Like love. It’s who you happen to meet.’

For many years Cornwell denied he had been a spook. It was the ethos of the time, he says. It is well known that he ran several ‘agents’. What he has never talked about is his own time in the field. ‘We did stuff,’ he says evasively. What stuff? ‘Oh, it could be anything. Going to some foreign country and sorting stuff out.’ Stuff, then.

In the Army he joined intelligence and from there it was a short hop to MI5 and, subsequently, MI6. Berlin was his operating arena. It has often been said that during the Cold War, East and West were simply opposite sides of the same, grubby coin. Not quite so, Cornwell insists. ‘Certainly, we did very bad things,’ he concedes. ‘We did a lot of direct action.

‘Assassinations. Although I was never involved. But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state. I promise you that even when quite ruthless operations are being contemplated, the process of democratic consultation was still relatively intact and decent humanitarian instincts came into play. Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn’t happen in the West.

‘There have been times when the CIA have been off the reservation. There is nothing more crazy than a bunch of male conspirators in a closed room trading secrets. That is how you get into the Bay of Pigs scenario.’

Two years ago, Cornwell made the headlines when he was misquoted – or misinterpreted – as saying he once considered defecting. He is anxious to set the record straight. ‘What I meant,’ he explains, ‘is that when you get into the masonry of espionage it is such a little journey to the other side. But no, I did not consider defecting. I was in the papers alongside a picture of Philby, which is about as offensive as it can get. But, whatever. It’s the next day’s fish and chip wrappings.’

None the less, he has defected in one instance. Success has brought a multimillionaire fortune. But Cornwell’s politics have been resolutely those of a staunch socialist. Though a lifelong Labour voter, he simply couldn’t support the Blair/Brown package and voted Liberal Democrat in the recent election.

‘Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go. The Blair/Brown feud and their factions dominated everything.

‘In the last shameful years there was wild over spending. When Alistair Darling was warning the financial crisis was the worst for 60 years, Brown almost sacked him for it. And the Blairs…’ Cornwell shakes his head despairingly. ‘Him and his wife. The shared greed that emanates from the pair. It’s embarrassing. I’ve become more radical in old age than I’ve ever been. The Blair catastrophe went far beyond the Iraq war and the destruction of the old Labour Party. It was about his creation of an inner circle.’

Neither is he a fan of the monarchy. ‘Let me explain that,’ he says, sensing another misrepresentation. ‘It is possible to have no time for the Royals but respect the institution.’ He has also, on several occasions, refused to accept a gong. When he first declined, during Mrs Thatcher’s government, she invited him to lunch.

Though no admirer of her politics, Cornwell respected her commitment and her intellect. ‘She turned to me over lunch and said: “Now that you are here, do you have anything to say to me?”’ Clearly Thatcher hoped he would address accepting a title. ‘I said yes, I think the Palestinian cause should be treated much more sympathetically. She stared at me and replied: ‘‘They trained the men who killed my friend Airey Neave.” And that was that.’

Cornwell actually finished writing his new book last October but the publishing process has been longer than usual this time because he has changed publishers from Hodder, with whom he had a 26-year relationship, to Penguin. ‘I’m entering my 80th year and I’m concerned about posterity,’ he says candidly.

‘Not for my reputation, but Penguin offered to take all my back list and make them into paperback classics. It was irresistible Posterity is in very wonderful hands. I am very pleased. Hodders still own Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy though and when the film is made they will do well. It was a very amicable parting.’

At the moment, five of Cornwell’s novels are being prepared for the big screen. Brad Pitt has an option for Night Manager and Gary Oldman and Colin Firth will star in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Last question, I tell him. Who would he like to see appear in Our Kind of Traitor? ‘Unknowns,’ he says succinctly. ‘Are we done? Good. Let’s have lunch. And we can have a drink.’

‘Our Kind of Traitor’ by John le Carré (Viking, £18.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p & p. Ring 0844 871 1516 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk. John le Carré will be signing copies at Waterstone’s, Picadilly, W1, on Sept 16 at 5pm